I recently spoke with Zweig about these talented, if uncommon, folks who derive satisfaction from the work itself rather than from glory or money (though they’re happy to be well-paid, and usually are).

Invisibles aren’t necessarily who you think they might be. Zweig isn’t talking about people with mundane, thankless jobs who go unnoticed. No, the Invisibles Zweig profiles (from the guitar tech for Radiohead to a United Nations translator to a structural engineer for skyscrapers) and others like them are highly-regarded people whose “work is really critical to their endeavor,” Zweig says.

“They’re highly skilled professionals. I’m not talking about the factory worker toiling away anonymously or the person who’s cleaning the hotel room. They’re important, too,” says Zweig. “But what I wanted to focus on were the people who are highly educated, very well trained, and very talented and who chose specific fields and certain roles that would put them behind the scenes.”

For most Invisibles, “the better they do their job, the more they disappear,” says Zweig. “It’s only if something goes wrong that they’re ever thought of. If they do their job perfectly, they are unnoticed.”

Zweig, a former magazine factchecker like me (a prime example of an Invisible job), wanted to find out why people choose to be Invisible at work and what those of us who aren’t Invisibles can learn from them.

As Zweig writes in Invisibles: Receiving outward credit for your work is overrated.”

Highlights from our conversation:

Next Avenue: Invisibles are swimming against the tide of self-promotion, aren’t they?

Zweig: Yes. We live in a culture where attention seems to be valued above everything else, where people are willing to humiliate themselves to get on a reality TV show.

Many of us spend so much time online today, hoping to gain more and more followers and more and more Likes on every Facebook post. These people are really doing the opposite of that.

The people who I profile for the book are at the tops of their fields. I picked them because I wanted to find out how they got so successful when, by and large, they are very self-effacing and not out there tooting their own horn the way so many of us feel we need to do. But the Invisibles are not an exclusive group.

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